How Live Soccer Broadcasts Are Achieved
As a self-confessed soccer obsessive, I need to be able to access live streams of the best games wherever I am. Sometimes it’s not always possible to find a place that shows the particular game I want to watch, but thanks to advances in technology I can now watch almost any game I want through a live soccer stream.
With the help of the internet and some networking facilities, I can watch football live through my computer at the office and my laptop if I am stuck in a hotel room somewhere. Being able to watch any one of a number of football matches being broadcast on a particular day is all well and good, but this article attempts to explain how it’s done for the more curious natures.
To understand how live soccer streams work, you first need to understand a bit about networks. In its simplest form, networking is a computer exchanging data with another computer. To be really simple, there is not much difference between this and sending a letter.
The first computer directs a piece of information to another computer and then sends it through the cable that connects the computers to each other. The second computer checks the addresses of all incoming messages and reads only messages addressed to it.
Live football streaming is achieved with the help of streaming media. This concept is not as strange as it sounds and it just acts like a normal television or radio broadcast that broadcasts football matches live. When you want to watch a certain football stream live, a program called a “streaming media server” splits the desired file into parts called “packages.”
These packets run across the Internet one at a time and are reassembled on your computer in the same way. As long as you have a fast internet connection and the server is not overloaded, the live soccer streams will start playing instantly on your PC and the file size is generally small.
Unfortunately, like most good things, there’s a downside to using football streams to get your fix of live action. Since it is live and needs to be delivered just in time over the potentially unpredictable Internet network, quality is sacrificed for speed and performance. Although the main use of streaming video is web distribution, this type is not suitable for local presentations.
To watch live soccer streams, your computer requires a special program, called a streaming media plug-in. These add-on programs are generally free and can be downloaded from the Internet.
The difference between downloading videos from the Internet and watching a live football stream is that the user does not need to wait for the entire media file to download before being able to watch it. While the quality may not be perfect, a live soccer stream seems to start playing almost instantly.